Although we cannot fully support you with the installation of LINUX at home, we can gather all your experiences here! So help your colleagues and send tips & solutions to jan.lemeire@vub.ac.be.
Installation of LINUX by non-experts gets easier, eg with RedHat 7.3 . A lot of info can be found on the internet, eg type your problem or error message in google and you will probably find some info.
Setup Files
Look at ftp.belnet.be for the software.
Eg: with the iso files (
7.0-i386-respin-disc1.iso) you can burn 2 install cd's (i386 is linux
for PC-pentium chips, alpha is for macintosh chips).
Partitioning
Partition the hard disk of your pc for example with PQ Partition Magix,
in Windows XP, partitioning is included in the setup.
If you use FAT as file system, your Windows drive will be recognised
under LINUX!
Hardware
Common hardware wil be automatically recognised...
Internet
set DNS etc under:
KDE -> system -> Control Panel -> Network configuration
proxyserver is under Webbrowser
Configuration
for the use of pvm, tmake, etc, some configuration is necessary (setting
of path and environment variables). On
our system this happens with the .path.local and .cshrc.local files.
This last file is executed after logging in. There will be a similar file
on your installation, something like .cshrc. It depends on the used shell,
check the environmental variable SHELL (echo $SHELL) for this.
We use csh.
In this file add environmetal variables with setenv PVM yes
Add directories to path with set PATH = ($PATH ~/project)
But these 2 last commands are csh commands, for other shells, they
can differ a little...
Your own Network
...